The Sum of Us

From building state universities in the 1800s to paying veterans’ tuition through the G.I. Bill after World War II, the U.S. government long provided massive support for Americans to attend college. In the 1970s, when nearly all students were white, public universities were primarily funded by the government and tuition cost an average of $617 a year. But by 2017, 40 percent of students are people of color, public spending on colleges has plummeted, and tuition and student debt have skyrocketed. Financial aid has shifted from mostly grants to mostly loans.

The new “debt-for-diploma system” particularly harms Black students, who must borrow far more because they have far less family wealth. McGhee is 40 and still has student loans, as do all of her Black friends. But the system also harms white graduates: 63 percent of them take on debt. McGhee asks why the U.S. has chosen to make college, the key for entering the middle class, totally inaccessible to working-class families. This is pure “self-sabotage.” By keeping college affordable, other developed countries have easily outpaced the U.S.

Racism explains the collapse of free public education in the U.S., just like it explains the drained public swimming pools. For instance, California leads the U.S. in innovation today in part because it built the nation’s first free, universal higher education system in the late 1800s. But in the 1970s, the state’s white voters passed a law capping property taxes, which devastated school funding. The campaign for this law was based on racist fearmongering about integration and Mexican immigrants.

While cutting funding to colleges and universities, states have dramatically ramped up spending on policing and incarceration. In the 1970s, the collapse in American manufacturing particularly hurt Black city-dwellers. The federal government responded by cutting spending on social programs and launching the war on drugs, which created the current system of mass incarceration. Now, Black people are six times more likely to be incarcerated for drug crimes than white people, even though they use drugs at the same rate. However, as opiate and methamphetamine use have grown in suburban and rural America, the war on drugs is starting to fail white people, too.

Similarly, the majority of Americans with student debt are now white. McGhee briefly profiles a 39-year-old who lives at home, works two jobs, and pays 75 percent of his earnings towards his loans; a young teacher who has paid $28,000 towards her loans but barely reduced the balance; and a disabled, bankrupt senior who is being sued over his loans. Many Americans with student debt regret going to college at all.

The U.S.’s healthcare system is even more regressive than its education system. Americans pay more and fare worse than people in any other developed country. This is because the U.S. is the only one without universal coverage. In the 1940s, senator Claude Pepper began campaigning for universal healthcare. But the American Medical Association lobbied aggressively against the idea, which they painted as a socialist, integrationist conspiracy. It also publicized images of Pepper with Black people, which contributed to him losing reelection. President Truman took up Pepper’s plan but never implemented it. Ultimately, White Americans—who were 90 percent of the population—undermined universal healthcare for themselves simply because they didn’t want people of color to have it, too.

In the 1960s, President Johnson created Medicare and Medicaid, which respectively cover the elderly and about half of low-income people. And the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act now subsidizes Americans to buy private insurance. But the U.S. never finished building out a universal system. Moreover, most white Americans still oppose “Obamacare,” and political science research shows that it’s because of racial resentment. In one experiment, white voters supported a public healthcare plan when told it was Bill Clinton’s, but not when told it was Barack Obama’s.

Rural hospitals are closing fast around the U.S., particularly in states that rejected Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion option. For instance, rural health expert Don McBeath tells McGhee that uninsured people’s unpaid bills are bankrupting the Texas hospital system, but the state still refuses to expand Medicaid to anyone beyond poor pregnant women. In most southern states, the annual income caps for a family of three to qualify for Medicaid are around $3,000-7,000, but in states that have expanded it, anyone earning less than about $30,000 is eligible—and the federal government foots the bill. In these states, like Arkansas, rural hospitals are thriving.

Political science research has found that states like Texas rejected Medicaid expansion largely because of zero-sum racist thinking: white voters think that Medicaid expansion will harm them, while benefitting Black and Latinx people. And white voters are so overrepresented that their preferences determine policy. While only 41 percent of Texans are white, two-thirds of their state lawmakers are. In meetings, these lawmakers warned that uninsured “freeloaders” would “come out of the woodwork like bugs” to claim government benefits. There was no chance they would vote to expand Medicaid. In fact, Texas governor Greg Abbott has built his political brand around opposing every Obama policy.

As Texas continues refusing to expand Medicaid, uninsured Texans continue dying of preventable and treatable conditions. An organizer named Ron Pollack tells McGhee about John, a white man whose uninsured wife died of stomach cancer. Her dying wish was for John to join Pollack’s bus trip to campaign for universal healthcare. Pollack, a white liberal who has dedicated his life to activism, tells McGhee that racial divisions and a lack of “social solidarity” are the main reasons why the U.S.—the world’s richest country—still doesn’t guarantee basic human rights and necessities to all its people. But McGhee wonders how much progress the U.S. could make if Americans managed to unlock this solidarity.

McGhee admits that it’s possible to tell stories about the U.S.’s declining public services without mentioning race. But when she ran Demos’s Race-Class Narrative Project, she learned that most Americans will only listen to such stories until race comes up—even if indirectly, through words like “‘illegals,’ drugs, gangs, and riots.” In other words, ignoring racism can’t beat the zero-sum paradigm; only confronting it head-on can do that. In 2018, a group of Minnesota Democratic activists reworked the state party’s messaging based on Demos’s research. They launched a “Greater Than Fear” campaign showing Minnesotans working together across racial lines, and they won the election.